a dream, which would make Hi's explicit dreams, dreams within a dream.16 Nietzsche claims that metaphysics begins with the fact of dreams.17 That is, with dreams we have a direct experience of a counternarrative, an alternative reality, to that of our everyday experience. This creates a need to determine which is the true narrative or the true reality, and that question calls forth metaphysics. If Nietzsche is right, this suggests a deep connection between dreams and philosophy. The idea of a counternarrative is what sets us free from the constraints of whatever narrative we happen to find ourselves in. This is the way in which philosophy can set us free, by empowering us to imagine other ways of being. Movies, in general, are very dreamlike—oneiric is the word for that—and, like dreams, seem to call for some interpretation and, also like dreams, can be a road to a new kind of freedom from what oppresses us.
“In dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote Delmore Schwartz.18 That is, in dreams we confront the pieces that are missing from the narrative that we are working with in our everyday lives. Hi's dreams are important to the movie because the movie itself is a kind of working through the issues that are raised in his dreams. The two escaped convicts, Evelle and Gale, are like emissaries from Hi's unconscious, come to remind him of his “true” nature. They emerge just as Hi is beginning to settle down into family life, and they can be seen as the part of his identity that he is not quite sure that he wants to give up yet. They are childlike, sloppy, and lawless, and they live only for the moment. They are literal and figurative remnants of Hi's earlier life, when all he lived for was to be an outlaw and when time moved in cycles so that he always knew where he was in time just by knowing where he was in a particular cycle.
At the beginning of the first section of Dante's Commedia, the “Inferno,” after Dante awakes in the dark wood, he sees a distant peak with the bright light of the sun, representing goodness, shining atop it. He turns to make his way toward it, but his way is blocked by three beasts: a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. These beasts are, allegorically, his own sins that he is not yet quite ready to give up, things that he cannot quite convince himself are really evil. Similarly, Hi has to confront his own outlaw ways, which have been at the core of his identity. In some sense, he knows that he has to give up those ways, but in another sense, he does not know that at all and really wants to hold on to those parts of himself. That is part of the conflict within himself that Hi has to work through during the course of the movie. When Hi does manage to work through some of his issues, these two emissaries from his unconscious go back down into the dark hole from which they escaped. We are never completely free of those desires we once nurtured but now suppress, but we can keep them in a prison so that they never see the light of day.
The prison escape is also a kind of a joke. Their emergence from a viscous hole in the ground looks a lot like birth. As Gale explains in Hi and Ed's living room, “We don't always smell like this, Miz McDunnough. I was just explainin’ to yer better half here that when we were tunnelin’ out we hit the main sewer,” which is a lot like what William Butler Yeats has Crazy Jane say to the Bishop in the poem “Crazy Jane and the Bishop”: “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement.”19 Life is a weird, messy business, and there is just no getting around that fact. Wisdom has to do with coming to grips with the messiness of it, the way it does not always go the way we would want it to go.
For Hi, something begins in that flash of light in which he first sees Ed, but that something takes an additional turn when Hi begins to process the remark by the prison counselor (Peter Benedek) about most people having a family at their age, that sets Hi to musing, then dreaming, then acting on an idea based on that remark. The hardest part of acting freely, if this is what freedom is, is staying true to one's original choice, remaining faithful, as Badiou says, to the event. The over-determining forces that would direct us along more predictable routes, including our own habits, do not suddenly vanish. On the contrary, they kick in with more force than ever. That is what Dante is talking about when he describes the three beasts that suddenly appear just as he tries to set off on a new direction in his life. The beasts overwhelm his resolve, and it is only with the intercessionary help of Virgil that he can go on. Hi will find himself driving past convenience stores on the way home from work, and, like Dante, he will find it too difficult to resist this particular beast in his own soul.
Andrew Pulver, writing for the Guardian about an encounter with Joel and Ethan Coen, identifies a passage from Ethan's book of stories, Gates of Eden, that Pulver suggests may have some biographical relevance but, in any event, does seem to tie in to a recurring theme in the Coen brothers’ movies. In the story “I Killed Phil Shapiro” there is a summer camp director, Rabbi Sam, who says, as words of welcome to the new camp recruits, “If You Will It, It Is No Dream.”20 As Pulver mentions, this phrase occurs in The Big Lebowski (1998) when Walter (John Goodman) says to the Dude (Jeff Bridges), attributing it to Theodor Herzl, “If you will it, Dude, it is no dream.”21 This phrase captures the central metaphysical and narrative tension of Raising Arizona, which has to do with what is a dream and what is reality: are the two separable, or are they, somehow, intimately related?
To paraphrase Delmore Schwartz, reality begins in dreams. That is, insofar as our reality is to be really ours, is to be a reality of our own choosing rather than what simply happens to us, then it will begin for us as an event to which we will remain faithful. The act will have consequences, and those consequences will entail responsibilities. Our freedom, somewhat ironically, will depend on our being true to, upholding, our responsibilities. This strict notion of being responsible, however, is ameliorated by the fact that these responsibilities are our responsibilities, that is, our own chosen responsibilities, rather than inauthentic responsibilities that are imposed upon us by others or by the system at large.
The Uses and Abuses of America
Raising Arizona does present a fairly piquant critique of America. The Pampers-stealing, gun-blasting, dog-chasing sequence is, for me, one of the funniest pieces in the whole movie. It is so funny to me, in part, because it captures something of the wild craziness of life in America, the way that the simplest acts, like getting something from the store, can become a kind of race for one's life. It is also so funny to me because of the way it picks up on a particular fear that I have about my fellow Americans and their (our) love of guns and violence and their (our) desire to shoot and destroy things. The store clerk, his mouth full of braces, has a mad gleam in his eye at the opportunity to pull out the shotgun and start blasting away. The cops behave in the same way. Even the neighborhood dogs seem to pick up the scent of bloodlust and get into the chase.
All of this, also, reflects something deep in the nature of capitalism, which is at the very core of our democracy. Capitalism does foster a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all. On the surface all of us are (mostly) very polite and cooperative, but there is a kind of cutthroat competitiveness that lurks just below the surface and is deeply imbued in the spirit of capitalism itself. The Arizona family reflects many of the features of capitalism. Nathan Arizona's (Trey Wilson) relentless commitment to selling himself and his furniture is a paradigm of what it takes to be successful in a capitalistic system. The irony of his oft-repeated claim, “And if you can find lower prices anywhere my name ain't Nathan Arizona!” is, of course, that his name ain't Nathan Arizona, or it wasn't before he changed it, so I guess it is Nathan Arizona but, as it were, barely, which does put kind of a spin on his famous claim for his prices.
Nathan Arizona is an example of someone who has literally created his own identity out of his own dreams of what he wanted to be. I would say that what he wants to be seems a little shallow, and this is part of the movie's critique of America and American life, but he has been remarkably successful at achieving it. Clearly, to achieve his dream he has had to adopt a basically antagonistic stance with respect to virtually everyone around him. As he says, “My motto is do it my way or watch your butt!” It is an excellent, even a necessary, motto for being a successful capitalist, although it's less good for making friends. Nathan's relationship with his wife seems to lack all intimacy, but we learn that there is a little more to Nathan Arizona than just pure capitalist.
There
